Humble Friends to the Rescue

The first study to link personality traits--rather than the situation at hand--to the likelihood of helping others found that people who are more humble tend to step up more than others.

If you're in need of a little
help from a friend, your humbler acquaintances may be the ones to call
on, according to a new study. People who are more humble tend to
step up to help others more than people who tend toward arrogance.
This is the first study to link personality traits -- rather than the
situation at hand -- to the likelihood of helping others.

The researchers designed a series of experiments to
measure participants' personality traits and then tested their
willingness to lend a helping hand.
The first one relied on self-reports from college students to assess
both personality and and how likely they were to assist others. The
more humble they rated themselves, the more helpful they said they were.
But since self-reports can be unreliable, the researchers followed up
with more objective means of measuring personality traits.

In the second part of the experiment, the researchers asked the
participants questions and used the answers to rate them in various personality characteristics.
Then the participants listened to a recording about a (fictitious)
student who had suffered an injury and couldn't attend class. They
students who ranked higher in humility were also more likely to donate
their time and resources to helping the fictitious student.

The third part of the experiment was similar to the second, except
that the researchers used participants' reaction times to various
situations to rate their humility and other traits. The correlation
between humility and helpfulness was also seen here. The results held
strong even when the researchers controlled for other characteristics
like empathy and agreeableness.

"The finding is particularly surprising since nearly 30 years of
research on helping have demonstrated that the situation, not the
person, tends to predict whether someone in need will receive help,"
said researcher Jordan LaBouff. For example, past research has found
that the presence of other people, and their behavior, strongly
influences one's likeliness of helping out. But in this study, the
people who were more humble were most likely to help others, even when
there was little external social pressure to do so.

LaBouff added that there could be a fundamental connection between
humility and altruism; but more research will be needed to flesh out
these relationships.
"This research builds upon a growing body of evidence that humility is
an important trait that results in a variety of pro-social and positive
outcomes," says the author. "It also suggests that if we can encourage
humility in our communities, people may be more helpful to those in
need."

The research was carried out at Baylor University in Texas, and published in the January 2012 issue of The Journal of Positive Psychology.